May 9, 2016

Program Notes

We begin with the massive forest fires in Alberta that have become the costliest natural disaster in Canada’s history and speak with Dr. Mike Flannigan, a Professor with the Department of Renewable Resources and the Director of the Western Partnership for Wildland Fire Science at the University of Alberta. He joins us to discuss the forest fire that began on May first as a part of the cycle of nature and that only when man-made structures a placed in the forests do you end up with the kind of damage in Fort McMurray where 88,000 people were evacuated and one fifth of the homes were destroyed at an estimated loss of $7 billion.

Then we look into the escalating legal battle between the governor of North Carolina and the U.S. Attorney General who today accused the state of North Carolina of “state-sponsored discrimination against transgender individuals”. Dr. Charles van der Horst, emeritus professor of Medicine at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Infectious Diseases joins us to discuss the cynical nature of the “bathroom” law being used by Republican lawmakers to rile up their religious right base for the upcoming elections and that little attention has been paid the rest of the laws that were slipped through in a special session such as banning any raise in the minimum wage.

Then finally we speak with Richard Winger, Publisher and Editor of Ballot Access News, about the efforts underway by dissident factions in the Republican establishment who are frantically searching for a candidate to run as a conservative alternative to Donald Trump, now the party’s presumptive standard-bearer. We will discuss the various ballot deadlines for Independent candidates entering the presidential race, most of which indicate that there is still time to get an Independent third party alternative to Trump on the ballot and that already the Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson is getting much more attention than usual due to Trump.